’Tis a barrel then of _hum-cup_, which we call the black ram.
Besides these strong ales and others too numerous to mention, there was, at the beginning of last century, a certain strong beer called Pharaoh, which gave its name to an ale-house at Barley, in Cambridgeshire. The reason of the name is not certainly known, although it was said in the county that it was so called because it _would not let the people go_. This drink is no longer made in England, but a strong beer of the same name is much appreciated in Belgium. The same liquor is mentioned in the _Praise of Yorkshire Ale_ (1685):
. . . Coffee, Twist, Old Pharaoh and old Hoc, Juniper Brandy and Wine de Langue-Dock.
As there have been many strong and mighty ales since the days when—
King Hardicanute, ’midst Danes and Saxons stout, Carous’d on nut-brown ale and dined on growt, { 159}
so there have been an abundance of small poor drinks, which have been from time to time known by various terms of contempt, the titles “whip-belly-vengeance” and “rotgut” being, perhaps, on the whole, the most expressive. Shakspere sums up the humdrum of retired matronly life in the well-known line, “To suckle fools and chronicle small beer.” Beer which had been kept so long that it had turned sour was at one time known as “broken beer,” much as we speak now of broken victuals. Ben Jonson, in his _Masque of Gypsies_, makes mention of an infant “very carefully carried at his mother’s back, rock’d in a cradle of Welsh cheese like a maggot, and there fed with _broken beer_, and blown wine of the best daily.”
In olden times small beer discharged that friendly office assigned by later and more fastidious days to soda-water, namely, the cooling of the parched throat after a too earnest devotion to the rites of _Bacchus_.
Welcome to my lips, great king of frolic, Stern foe to headache, devils blue, and cholic— No dandy soda-water bring to me, No Lady’s lemonade, no soft bohea; Thy sterner aid I claim, and ask thy might To quell the riots of that punch last night;
wrote one of the Brasenose College poets. Christopher Sly, awakening from his debauch, cries aloud for “a pot of small ale . . . and once again a pot of the smallest ale,” and Prince Hal “remembers the poor creature small beer.”